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Articles tagged with: engineer

The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) has proposed a zero-emission Hypersonic Transportation aircraft that may turn flights into green-modes of transportation. The concept jet runs on a biofuel, seaweed, and will be able to achieve speeds above the atmoshpere, at 3,125 miles per hour.

The Zero Emission High Speed Transport (ZEHST) will make the current Concorde obsolete, and best of all, won’t harm our Earth anymore than all the cars we have on the road, at present.

What do you guys think of wooden accessories? Is it a cool take on technology or a geeky dream fit for a 40 year old software engineer? There are a few wooden accessories out right now, but is it just a fad or something that may catch fire and stay caught…on fire. One wooden accessory out there comes in the form of a keyboard and mouse.

It’s called the Brando USB Full Keyboard and it looks like a wooden slate with beige-colored Scrabble pieces for the keys. The mouse itself looks like something you would find in the 90s in some geek’s mansion. Yep, geeks have mansions.

Heavy duty machinery, such as tractors have been used for mining and agriculture for a very long time. When these heavy duty machines are used, not only do they use up a lot of fuel and produce byproduct carbon emissions, but they are used for hours on end- usually to get some type of job done.

Fortunately, researchers at Aalto University in Finland have taken the success of hybrid technology from cars and implanted that knowledge to build hybrid machines. The heavy duty hybrids use both combustion and electric engines, cutting fuel consumption in half.

A team at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics will announce on May 1st, 2011 that they have designed lasers that can ignite fuel/air mixture in combustion engines. With this approach, the engine’s efficiency will increase dramatically, thereby reducing pollution by igniting more of the mixture. The team is currently in talks with the spark plug manufacturer. Spark plugs currently work by igniting the fuel mixture near the spark gap which reduces the combustion efficiency. The spark plug’s metal is also prone to erode through time.

ets usually run on high-octane oil byproducts, however, NASA has tested jets running on fuel based animal fat. In March and April of this year, researchers at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center in California tested biofuel made of chicken and beef waste fat in the engine of a DC-8 airplane. NASA hopes that the study makes people realize that biofuels do not necessarily have to come from plant sources. According to NASA, fuel can come from algae or rendered animal fat. NASA doesn’t believe that fossil fuels are necessary as a fuel source.

The researchers tested the new animal-based biofuel through an engine burning Jet Propellant 8 fuel, similar to the industry standard Jet-A used in commercial aircraft.

According to CultofMac, Apple is working on a way to synchronize iPods and iTunes wirelessly. Steve Jobs is working hard to ensure that the next generation of Apple products will be wireless, at least for the iPod. Instead of importing music, movies, and apps manually through wires, the iPods will auto-sync with your iTunes whenever it is connected to your WiFi network. I will admit this is cool only because it makes iPods easier to use, especially for people who aren’t as computer friend as others.

NASA confirmed on April 8th, 2011 that a government shutdown might delay the final launch of the space shuttle Endeavour. The odds of a shutdown increased when Democrats and Republicans wrestled over a budget plan. According to Computerworld, a NASA spokesman said that although a shutdown lasting only a few days would not “affect the scheduled April 29 shuttle launch, a longer shutdown” would.

The federal government cannot close for over a week if the Endeavour is to stick to schedule. As previously mentioned, this will be Endeavour’s final flight before…

Biomedical engineering students from Ryerson; Michael Prywata and Thiago Caires, have created a prosthetic arm that is controlled by brain signals. The two undergraduate students are changing the medical prosthesis realm with their new device. The Artificial Muscle-Operated (AMO) Arm allows amputees more range of movement than your typical prosthetic arm and also allows amputees to avoid invasive surgeries, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. The device is powered by artificial muscles simple pneumatic pumps and valves to create movements. The device uses compressed air as the main source of power.

U.K. investment firm Passion Capital just raised a fund of $60 million, $40 million of which was contributed by the U.K. government. They plan to make around 50 investments with the fund, each around $200,000, mostly to companies with little more than a pitch or a prototype. They recently released their invest strategy on their lovely website.

Partners Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero, are former European angle investors before they got together to launch…

According to Eclipse’s website; “Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects and helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.”

The project was created by IBM in November of 2001 and is fueled by a number of software vendors. It is funded by their annual memberships and is governed by a Board of Directors. They claim to provide four services; IT Infrastructure, IP Management, Development Process, and Ecosystem Development. After years of working explicitly with PHP and AJAX platforms, the Eclipse Foundation will go back to basics with